Stories

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Xavier Shay recently posted an article entitled, "Threading Ruby," on Ruby Source. In it, he shows how to create a multi-threaded application with safe, shared data structures to perform a fairly common task. It's a good read to introduce yourself to threading and the thread safe libraries provided natively within Ruby.

Josh Susser recently released Informal, a gem which allows you to easy make any Ruby object compatible with Rails 3 forms. The benefit here, is that you don't have to remember that you need ActiveModel::Naming, ActiveModel::Validations, and ActiveModel::Conversions, as well as a persisted? method, and more. You want to be ActiveModel::Lint-compliant, don't you?

This week, we came across Tire, a gem by Karel Minarik. Tire provides you with an API/DSL for interacting with ElasticSearch; which is an open-source, distributed, RESTful, search engine built on Apache Lucene. Tire comes with ActiveModel extensions allowing your application to automatically index and search your data.

Ruby Hero, Gregory Brown is back again to try another Ruby Mendicant experiment. Last time, he raised enough money to spend some significant time working on open source projects. Well, this time, he's doing it again, but attempting an subscription model. If you've ever used Prawn or seen the Ruby Mendicant University, it's probably worth your money to invest a bit.

KidsRuby.com is an initiative by the Hybrid Group that aims to teach kids to write software. It's a downloadable application that runs on a Mac or PC and comes built-in with a Ruby tutorial. If you know a kid, or someone who is a kid at heart, who wants to learn Ruby, maybe pass this along.

Clemens Kofler recently put out a call offering free Ruby or Rails help to the community. So, if you're stuck on a problem, want another set of eyes on your project, or just want to share Ruby knowledge, consider booking some time with him.

Starting today, Jeremy McAnally and Ryan Waldron are producing and distributing a live web show called RubyRescue.TV. They'll be broadcasting every Tuesday starting at 2pm Eastern. Live is always more fun, so set your alarm and peek in on the inaugural episode.

Donald Piret recently released asset_hash, a library to help manage your application's CloudFront-hosted assets. It bases its naming on file fingerprints, so it only uploads modified files and works well with Jammit.

William Taysom has been developing a library called "must_be," which creates simple runtime assertions. These could be used to verify that a method input is of the expected type (or that it's the RIGHT duck) and its behavior is configurable, either throwing exceptions, ignoring failures, or logging them out for you to see, later.

Previous Episodes

It was not such a good_friday after the cloud got it's butt kicked last Thursday, but we're still here to go over some asynchronous job options, a new interactive Ruby console, image diffs, and an interactive rails.js on this episode of Ruby5.